But then he thought: And so what if he is? It was coffee, not an offer of marriage, and, assuring himself of this, he thought then of Charles Griffith, and how he had not heard from him since their last meeting, before Christmas, and felt his neck grow hot, even in the cold.
The café, when they reached it, was less a café than a kind of teahouse, a cramped, rough-floored place with rickety wooden tables and backless stools. The front part was a shop, and they had to inch past a crowd of patrons examining barrels containing, variously, coffee beans and dried chamomile flowers and mint leaves, which the establishment’s two Chinamen employees would scoop into paper sacks and weigh on a brass scale, totting up the numbers on a wooden-bead abacus, whose constant, rhythmic clacking provided the place with its own percussive music. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the mood was lively and convivial, and the two men found a place to sit near the fireplace, which sent a stream of snapping embers spiraling through the air like fireworks.
“Two coffees,” Edward told the waitress, a plump Oriental girl, who nodded and trotted off.
For a moment, they sat staring at each other across the small table, and then Edward smiled, and David smiled back at him, and they smiled at each other smiling at each other, and then both began, at once, to laugh. And then Edward leaned close to him, as if to deliver an intimacy, but before he could speak, a large group of young men and women—university students, by the look and sound of them—came in, settling down at a table near theirs, not even pausing in their debate, one that had been fashionable for college-age young men and women to have for decades, since even before the War of Rebellion: “I am only saying that our country can hardly consider itself free if we cannot welcome Negroes as whole citizens,” a pretty, sharp-featured girl was saying.
“But they are welcome here,” countered a boy across from her.
“Yes, but only to pass through on their way to Canada or to the West—we do not wish them to stay, and when we say we open our borders to anyone from the Colonies, we do not mean them, and yet they are even more persecuted than the ones to whom we offer shelter! We think ourselves so much better than America and the Colonies, and yet we are not!”
“But Negroes are not people like us.”
“But they are! I have known—well, not I, but my uncle, when he was traveling through the Colonies—Negroes who are just like us!”
There was jeering from some of the group at this, and then one boy said, in a lazy, arrogant drawl, “Anna would have us believe that there were even redskins like us, and we ought never to have eradicated them but left them to their savagery.”
“There were Indians like us, Ethan! That has been documented!”
This was greeted with the entire table shouting their response, and between the ruckus they made, and the click-click of the abacus, now louder than before, and the heat of the fire on his back, David began to feel woozy. It must have shown on his face, for Edward leaned again across the table and asked him, in a near-shout, if he might want to go elsewhere, and David said he would.
Edward went to find the waitress to tell her they didn’t need the coffees, and the two of them shouldered past the table of students and the customers waiting for their bags of tea, and out into the street once more, which felt, for all its activity and life, a relief, spacious and quiet.
“It can get quite loud in there,” said Edward, “especially toward late afternoon—I should have remembered. But it’s nice, usually, really.”
“I’ve no doubt,” he murmured, politely. “Is there somewhere else we can go?” For, although he had been teaching at the school for six months, it was not a neighborhood in which he dallied—his visits there were short and purposeful, and he felt himself too elderly to frequent the pubs and inexpensive coffeehouses that made the area so attractive to students.
“Well,” said Edward after a moment’s silence, “we could go to my flat, if you could bear it—it’s very nearby.”
He was surprised by this offer, but also gratified—for was this not exactly the kind of behavior that drew him to Edward initially? A promise of free-spiritedness, a blithe disregard for conventions, a dispensing of old modes of behavior and formality? He was modern, and in his presence, David felt modern as well, so much so that he accepted straightaway, emboldened by his new friend’s irreverence, and Edward, nodding as if he’d expected this answer （even as David was momentarily stunned by his own boldness）， led him first north and then west on Bethune Street. There were handsome houses on this street, newly built brownstones in whose windows tapers of candles flickered—it was only five in the afternoon, but already the night was drawing around them—but Edward strode past them all to a large, shabby, once-grand structure quite close to the river, a mansion of the kind David’s grandfather had been raised in, although in ill condition, with a swollen wooden door that Edward had to tug at repeatedly to open.
“Watch the second step; there’s a stone missing,” he warned, before turning to David. “It’s not Washington Square, I’ll grant you, but it’s home.” The words were an apology, but his smile—that beam!—made them into something else: not quite a boast, perhaps, but a statement of defiance.
“How did you know I live on Washington Square?” he asked.
“Everyone knows,” Edward replied, but in a way that made it sound as if living on Washington Square had been David’s own accomplishment, something worthy of congratulation.
Once inside （having taken care to avoid the troublesome second step）， David could see that the mansion had been converted into a boardinghouse; to the left, where the parlor would be, was a breakfast room of sorts, with a half-dozen tables of different styles and a dozen chairs, also of different designs. He could tell, by just a glance, that the furniture was poorly made, but then he noticed, in a corner, a handsome, turn-of-the-century secretary of the kind his grandfather had in his own parlor, and moved to examine it. The wood had not been polished in apparently months, and its finish had been destroyed by some inferior oil; its surface, when he touched it, was sticky, and when he brought his hand away, his fingers were padded with dust. But it had once been a fine piece, and before he could ask, Edward, behind him, said, “The proprietress of this place was once wealthy, or so I’ve heard. Not Bingham wealthy, of course”—there it was again, a mention of his family and their fortune—“but moneyed.”
“And what happened?”
“A husband given to excess gambling, who then ran away with her sister. Or so I’ve been told. She lives on the top floor, and I rarely see her—she’s quite elderly—her distant cousin manages the place now.”
“What’s her name?” David asked—if the owner had truly once been rich, his grandfather would know of her.
“Larsson. Florence Larsson. Come, my room is this way.”
The carpet on the staircase was frayed in some places, worn clean through in others, and as they climbed the flights, Edward explained how many boarders lodged there （twelve, including him） and how long he’d lived there （a year）。 He seemed not a bit embarrassed by his surroundings, its poverty and disrepair （water had discolored the posy-print wallpaper, rendering it a haphazard pattern of large, irregular splotches of yellow）， nor to be living in a boardinghouse at all. Of course, many people lived in boardinghouses, but David had never met one, much less been inside this kind of building, and he looked about him with curiosity and some small measure of trepidation. How people lived in this city! According to Eliza, whose own charity work involved the resettlement and housing of refugees from the Colonies and of immigrants from Europe, the conditions of most new residents were deplorable; she had told them of families crammed ten to a single room, of windows that went uncaulked even in the coldest weather, of children who were scalded while edging too close to a grateless fire in a wretched attempt to warm themselves, of roofs that wept rain directly into the living quarters. They would listen to these stories and shake their heads and Grandfather would cluck his tongue, and then the talk would turn to something else—Eden’s studies, perhaps, or a show of paintings Peter had recently seen—and Eliza’s deplorable residences would fade from their memories. And yet here he was, David Bingham, in a home of the kind none of his siblings ever would have dared enter. He found himself aware that he was having an adventure, and then ashamed at his pride, for, in truth, being a visitor demanded no kind of bravery at all.